Dear Jonas,

Yesterday we went to see the Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum. Your dad says you fell asleep shortly after seeing the Johnny Rotten portrait. Since your Dad could be a sort of handsome John Lydon, I guess that makes sense. Maybe the pinks and oranges felt familiar. If so, I think her paintings worked on you in the same way they arrested me: their obsession with fey, arrogant beauty is one with which I am familiar.

Reviews of Peyton’s work often describe her colors as “gem-like,” but her palate is totally Ziggy Stardust’s androgynous make-up box: kabuki exotica sharply blended over pallid junkie foundations. The obviousness of the colors—chartreuse, carmine, indigo—denaturalize her subjects and lend them their emphatic beauty. The impossible glamour is underlined by the fact that viewers can’t always be sure of which of Peyton’s subjects are people she knows and which are people with whom she has fantasized a relationship, a move that destabilizes their relationships to copy and original. The eyes of each painting seduce, reach out, and reassure the viewer with a very pretty urgency: your desire is not impossible, or, to quote Lady Stardust: “Oh no love, you’re not alone!”

Her work is successful in the way that young adult fiction by Francesca Lia Block, or films by Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are not. Whereas these people often have the necessary ingredients for glittery preciousness, the end result is almost always cloying and self-congratulatory. Peyton’s small squares promise a captivating, actually existing, world of aristocratic common people where beauty is a generative response to beauty. Like Todd Haynes, Peyton renders a process of desire visible. There is a queer argument to this exhibit that is keenly exposed by “E.P.’s” self-portraits in which she may as well be one of her young male sylphs: become what you want. As contemporary queer theory has shown, this is entirely possible but with the permanent caveat of subjection: we cannot exist without context, without history, without other, and in this sense Lady Stardust’s advice is also practical and contemplative—autonomy is impossible. I had the sense that, had E.P. begun her career a bit later, there would be more of an “all the young dykes” feel in place of all the young dudes. I hadn’t before put the current trans-aesthetic in line with the history of hot androgynies Peyton has curated, but I think a link might be drawn. In any case, there is a consistency of gaze and figure throughout the entire collection that underscores the fragile ways we own our attractions—what is it that all of these objects have in common? What exactly is the desire that Peyton has isolated through this work? Looking at the portrait of Keith Richards somehow made the million times I've watched Gimme Shelter make sense. Perhaps the show’s title offers one explanation: “Live Forever.” Of course vampires are the only ones who enjoy this privilege—vampires and anyone beautiful enough to make their way into one of these paintings.

"black" by Min Song


Dear Jonas,

Last Saturday, for a change, I didn’t have to go to work. Your Dad and I took you out for brunch in the early afternoon, which seems to be your favorite time of day for adventures. I wrapped you in all of your layers and carried you in the sling, and you waved to the air with your mittens and grunted when the wind got too invasive. We rode the train to Bedford, and then walked to the restaurant, and soon afterwards I pulled you onto my lap and gave you a bottle. While you were eating you stared at the photograph on the wall just at your eye level and the tin tiles on the ceiling. Afterwards you actually sat on my lap while I ate, which you have never done before. You are three months old this week. There were other babies in the restaurant, but you weren’t interested. You didn’t cry when they cried or give them a nod of baby recognition when they bounced by on a parent’s shoulder. You focused on the light fixtures, and their shadows, and the glass in the windows, and the decorative lace on the walls.

Later that night, just before you fell asleep, I left to go see your Auntie Beth’s dance performance. Beth came to the hospital when you were just one day old and held you, and we like to go and visit her when she’s at work, too. She’s pretty like Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe she’ll teach you about dancing some day. This weekend she had her first solo show at a place called The Kitchen, and it was called “what it looks like, what it feels like.” The performance didn’t start until 8pm, which is when you usually go to bed, so you stayed home with Daddy, but I wish you both could’ve come, too. The piece was a consideration of this word “like,” and whether or not it is possible. In the context of this title, “what it looks like, what it feels like,” like indicates a similarity or resemblance. In other words, the dancers’ movements are showing the audience how “it” looks and how “it” feels. Part of the challenge of interpreting the performance is to consider what “it” is intended to modify. “It” is a strange word that means nothing on its own—it is a way of referring back to something that has already been described; however, in the case of Beth’s performance, it is a non sequitur. We begin in the middle without a direct point of reference, and so we are left to imagine what it is that corresponds to what we see.

Or not. We might take a different route and understand the performance as a meditation on the impossibility of ever showing exactly what something is “like.” For the first portion of the performance, the dancers move across squares of mirrored glass, which fit together like a tic tac toe board. Two women almost double each other’s movements as they ignore and engage another woman moving alone in the center of the stage. Women crawl, sometimes slither, across the surface. Dancers come close, envelop each other’s bodies with rounded arms, one woman slumps onto the back of another, the woman underneath balances the other’s weight just slightly off the ground. The glass is somehow opaque and imperfectly reflective, creating the sensation that the mirrored foundation for the dancers’ confident movements could also, without warning, swallow them whole. Transparency is certainly on trial, and when each square is removed during the performance by groups of two—dancers and stage hands—each upturned mirror briefly reflects the audience as it is carried away, returning an image more like a funhouse distortion than a recognizable twin. At this point, the “it” itself is doubled. Audience and performer, self and other, are projected onto each other just as the dancers have at different points mimicked, but not mirrored, each other’s movements.

As the mirrors are carried offstage, the line between performers and spectators as well as the designation of any particular space as stage—reminding us that stage or no stage, we are always performing—is relaxed. During the next sequence, the shadows cast on the walls replace the reflections from the mirrors. In a series of stunningly complex variations, the dancers perform the same smooth gestures, each at slightly different times, enacting a continuum of variation within the restraint of a single move, offering yet another possibility of what it looks like to always, in some sense, be an other to one’s self. Using the body to make visible the complex workings of subjectivity, the limitations of self-knowledge are rigorously yet honestly conveyed. All of these different movements around a single “it” have taken the cohesive, self-same “I” and shown “it” to be an enterprise that is always already collective.

You, Jonas, are only three months old, but so many places and people have already contributed to what you will be “like.” You have a whole slew of aunties and uncles who will help you understand ideas like performance, me, you, self, and other. You are just now beginning to notice that when you wave your hands,when you circle your fingers around an object, you can make something happen. Hopefully this is an idea you will never tire of considering.

Dear Jonas,

“B” is for beets, Bolaño fever, Bildungsroman, and for brisk, too, because it is cold outside now. We went into the city today to run an errand and you wore layers of clothes beneath an anorak. As usual, you weren’t displeased with the bulk of the clothing. When I faced you toward the mirror as I folded you into the sling, you mugged big smiles. Only when i wrapped my long black scarf over your face to block the wind did you begin to protest. You like to see where you’re going.

I finished Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives last week, so now I can return to reading Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. I’m resisting jumping into Bolaño’s 2666, the translation of which just came out last week. I tell myself that the last thing I need is a 912 page detour from the dissertation, especially since I just indulged in a 648 page one; nonetheless, the pull is strong indeed. I suppose if I purchase it now but read the entire thing while we are out of the city at your grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving, I won’t really be disturbing my work. What I mean is that I anyway won’t work on the dissertation while we are away from home, so it would be nice to finish something next week. Maybe if I make it into a challenge, I won’t feel guilty. "Thanksgiving" always makes me feel guilty enough on its own.

Truth be told, I spent almost as much time making a beet salad as I did writing today. We walked to the vegetable shop up on Graham Avenue and picked out the beets and other ingredients. When we came home I rinsed clumps of dirt from their leaves and bulbs. I shaved each beet with a vegetable peeler and chopped them all in the little food processor. I stained my fingers and the corners of my mouth with their juice, and somehow splattered the wooden floor with fuschia droplets, too. Then I washed, chopped and shaved fennel and carrots. I mixed them all together with olive oil and pistachios and we ate it over sautéed kale. I joke to myself that pleasurable exercises like this one illustrate the general rebellion against the Bildungsroman the dissertation is meant to invoke. In other words, if a Bildungsroman is supposed to illustrate its hero’s collaboration with adulthood, my reticence to ever actually finish my dissertation is a small act of discomfort with the fantasy of adulthood my written argument has yet to produce.

Thanksgiving will mark your first visit to the country, and knowing how much you like the noise of the streets and the trains here and dislike the quiet of the parks, I am curious to see how you will react to the silence. I hope the leaves are still on the trees and that you will tolerate a few long walks in your stroller. I am anticipating that you will enjoy the shiny colors and the shadows made by the fireplace. Hopefully you will be able to see the deer that come into the yard at sunset.

From Auntie Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself:

"An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not 'mirror' one's own constitution."


Dear Jonas,

Today’s word is “affirm.” We’ve been out walking a lot over the past two days because I am too excited to stay home. For some reason Obama’s electoral landslide makes me want to be around people. I want to see how everyone else is taking it, and I guess I’m craving some sort of recognition from our neighbors. I turn normal interactions into gestures loaded with meaning; commonplace body language becomes knowing winks and nods and sparkling eyes saying: Obama. Saying: it’s okay that you had that baby. Hegemonic alterations of power really happen. It’s good that you’re here in Brooklyn. It matters that you are right here in your skanky precious gorgeous neighborhood. For all of its utter ridiculousness, Williamsburg understands that the devil is in the details.

I’m thinking about the little shops with owners who seem more concerned with process than profit, the food, the obsession with style, Spoonbill & Sugartown—my favorite bookstore—where we bought a copy of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch during their “All Hail Obama” sale, bicycles chained to everything, seriously hot trannies, Desert Island—the carefully curated comics store, assiduously prepared coffee at Oslo or Gimme Coffee, warehouses, woodshops, a mister softee on every corner and Ben Van Leeuwen’s artisanal ice cream truck driving past us on Metropolitan Ave on his way into Soho, slices of Manhattan viewable from almost anywhere, morning glories trellised around streetfront gates, rooftop honey, grassfed beef at Diner, dog parks, record shops, locally brewed beer, babies, hipster milliners, green markets, paper thanksgiving decorations in half of the windows in my neighborhood, alleyways, locally made Salvatore lesbian ricotta, Polish newspapers, Italian street festivals, skylights, neighborhood gardens, the lesbian couple I met the other night and their little guy a few months older than you who invited us to the mom’s group at the Greenpoint Church, and running into friends from Gainesville on the train. This is a very, very small sampling of what makes our neighborhood so special.

The point is that I am feeling a correlation between the way I was nervous of investing myself in the current election and the way I have been reticent to connect to my neighborhood since I moved here a year and a half ago. I’ve spent my entire life being disappointed by American electoral politics. (I still remember my middle school gifted teacher, Mrs. Weimer who rode her bike to school every day, with her Dukakis button on election day telling me: “it doesn’t look good.”) And I’ve spent the last year here at a critical distance from my surroundings because it just seemed too good to be true. But this election has reminded me that it just doesn’t matter. Barack’s administration might turn out to be a total failure, but at least he, and we, have decided to try. Likewise, all of the creative world-making that goes on around here might be a total waste of time, but I doubt it. These examples I’m giving you are tiny, careful gestures of hope that are collectively producing a kind of localized alteration of the possible. In short, maybe politics looks different than we thought it did, but it starts with an affirmation that other worlds are possible. And affirmation involves understanding that we can’t stop because we don’t know exactly what change will look like; embracing that opacity is what makes affirmation exciting.

Dear Jonas,

This is a quote from Uncle John Berger, who might argue that this election has produced a new "way of seeing": "Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."

Little guy, you were born in the year of Obama. Now it is our job to teach you what that means. When Jesse Jackson described what happened yesterday as "ecstasy," he was pointing to the transformation of "what is and what it not desirable" this election has inaugurated. Si se puede. Yes we can. We are winning.

Dear Jonas,

While I was pregnant with you I read, among other things, The Tin Drum and A Personal Matter—neither of which take a comforting approach to childbirth. I read these to myself, and to you I read Proust. I liked the idea that we will probably keep reading Proust until you’re a teenager, and I couldn’t wait to sit next to your bassinet and read you to sleep. As it happens, that’s just not something you’re into yet. When I tried you looked frustrated, as if I were giving you orders you couldn’t carry out. Nonetheless, I want to read to you, so I’m trying a new strategy: poetry. At first it just seemed like a practical way to appease myself. We don’t have to worry about saving our spot or finishing a chapter. We can keep a collection in the diaper bag and start wherever we want whenever we want. I can cheat and keep reading when you fall asleep in the park, then pick up back where we left off without boring myself. If we read the same poem 10 times before we can move on to the next one, well, that’s what we should be doing anyway. I realized this is how I want you to learn how to read. Poetry makes more sense than Proust.

Your first collection is Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners. To get us started, I had pulled out the big blue Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Michael Hofmann’s Corona, Corona, and Zagajewksi. There’s a certain Gainesville pedigree to this sequence that I wasn’t really thinking about when I grabbed the books, and maybe I’ll explain that to you later. I picked up Zagajewski first simply because I haven’t read him yet, and this seems to have been a good choice. You let me read 5 poems: “A Quick Poem,” “Transformation,” “September,” “Mysticism for Beginners,” and “Anthology.” You were attentive throughout. I know you were probably just paying attention to my hair or staring at the shape of the book, but that’s not really the point. We’re starting something that, like any difficult method of study, won’t even start to make sense for years.

Here are some words from these first few poems that I like. Let’s just hold onto them for a while: garden, spider, crimson, roosters, cassock, bonfire, baroque, chestnut, sparks, swallows, herons, nightingale, scarlet.

Dear Jonas,

Pumpkins are in season, and I brought one home for you. This means Halloween is coming and the weather has turned. The warm, moist air you’ve gotten used to is now crisp and chilly. You stick your tongue out to test the difference, and you seem to approve. The mittens Laura knitted for you are on your little hands 24 hours a day, but you kick off your tiny socks after a few minutes. Today was your grandpa’s—my father’s—birthday, and when I was little he and I began a tradition that released in me a sort of immediate nostalgia. It has to do with the pumpkins. And the air. And cacti.

I suppose I should tell you about nostalgia first. The Greek root words for nostalgia are ‘returning home’ and ‘pain’: homesickness. In its early days, nostalgia was diagnosed as a physical illness. It is now understood as a psychic phenomenon similar to melancholy, which I will tell you about later. There are other generative types of nostalgia that things such as theme parks and political campaigns create, but I want to tell you about something quite different—something soft and private that teaches you how to coddle your past.

I’m going to guess that I was 3 years old when I had an experience that would later repeat itself countless times as nostalgia. My Dad picked me up from preschool at Peniel Baptist Academy in his sky blue Chevy pick-up truck. That truck had a CB that worked and a cigarette lighter we weren’t allowed to play with. Dad still had a long blonde ponytail and his beard was still red. On this particular day, once I was next to him in the bouncy cab of the Chevy, he explained that we were going to pick out a pumpkin on our way home. I actually don’t remember where we went and if it was a big patch of pumpkins or if we just went to the produce department at Publix. I do remember him explaining that we had to decide if we wanted a large or small, round or skinny one. Then we could examine all of the pumpkins with that shape until we found one that was just right. Importantly, the whole pumpkin did not have to be perfect. What it really needed was a nice smooth side that would serve as its face. Later we would decide what sort of a face (scary, silly, teeth or no teeth) to carve. When we were finished, our pumpkin would be lit from the inside with a little candle, and its transformation into a jack-o-lantern would be complete.

I am telling you how I remember this day, which might actually be a composite of several years of pumpkin carving with my father. The association of my Dad with pumpkins, and with the first cool weather of the year, and with our daily ritual of him picking me up from preschool, these are the impressions that come back to me. I also remember the first time I felt a memory bristle like this with loss and pleasure at the same time. The following summer, Dad and I were walking through the yard looking for vestigial cacti. Since we’d moved in two years earlier, he had been digging them up at the root one-by-one. On this particular day we were hunting for residual succulent mines, and talking about time. For some reason I wanted to know which month was my father’s favorite. He chose October for its weather and because of his birthday. When he said this, our previous October and the pumpkin came back to me. It felt like a regular memory, but it made my stomach tingle, too. The memory turned visceral, and the rest of my day became a comparison between today and last October. I can’t tell you if we found any cactus plants that day, but I felt as if I’d stepped on one anyway. Nostalgia is like that: you can never completely uproot it, and it will pierce you when you aren’t paying attention. You are better off just letting it grow.

In Japanese, “natsukashii,” condenses the term into an emotion. Someday you might find that a cat sinking as he tries to walk through snow or a chuckling diesel engine or a bush of white azaleas in first bloom triggers a memory so sharp that it derails your whole week, or ruins the new relationship to which you’ve been trying to devote yourself, or makes you want to call me, and when it does, you can. Just say, “Natsukashii, ne.” I’ll know what you mean.

Dear Jonas:

Today you, your Dad, and I went to the coffee shop around the corner for bagels and coffee. You’re starting to sit straight up in your sling, so you got to meet two of our neighbors and three dogs before we’d even left the apartment building. On our way into the coffee shop an old lady wandering down the street caught sight of you: “A boy!” she confirmed. Yes, I replied, wary of her approval. “Good!” she blared, and improbably started calling you “Butchy Butchy Butchy.” Your onesie was stitched with rainbow-colored giraffes outlined in pink and turquoise—the picture of infant machismo. (I’d thought your femme onesies would perform a sort of armor against the ever-present gender fairy godmothers, but I was dead wrong.) Suddenly, her face hardened: “Stupid pacifiers. I don’t believe in ‘em,” she chided us, and abruptly skulked away. We raised our eyebrows at each other and went into the coffee shop.

Daddy and I ordered, sat down, and began reading the paper. You fell asleep. I started, as usual, with the Sunday Styles' weekly homage to nihilism: the modern love column. Then I flipped through the rest of the section. I like seeing which topics are siphoned off as matters of style each week—their alleged silliness made anodyne through their separation from serious news. That wedding announcements and contemporary confessions of desire are interpreted as style seems as telling as the relocation of Frank Rich from Arts & Leisure to Op-Ed, but that was before your time. Today Sunday Styles ran an article, inspired by Mayor Bloomberg’s intention to run for a third term, on what one numerologist describes as the “sunshine” number: three. The article has gone silly over triplicates: “Whence, then, the lure of three? How did it become the perfect number of fairy tale characters, of stooges, of syllables in a loved one’s name — tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth?”

Me: “Huh. There’s this goofy article on the significance of the number three. It doesn’t mention the dialectic. Not even once.”

Daddy: “I’m sorry, did you not notice that you’re reading the STYLE section?”

Me: "I know. I know. But the dialectic is precisely about style; it uses form as argument."

Here’s Uncle Jameson on Adorno in Marxism and Form: “But dialectical thinking is thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time.”

And Uncle Hebdige from Subculture and the Meaning of Style: “However, the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style.”

Now, I understand that the New York Times is the antithesis of a subcultural publication, but its omissions frame and inform readers through a kind of dialectical process. Sunday Styles positions style as consumption, rendering it harmless and accessible. This argument is oblique only through its obviousness, leaving readers to think to the second power, to hold out for the possibility of what an analysis of style might bring. In other words, Butchy, after you learn how to make sense of what’s on the page, you’ll have to flip that skill and keep abreast of what you’re not seeing, too.

Dear Jonas,

For the next six months or so you will only eat one thing: breast milk. Its flavor may change depending upon what I eat, but you will have to grow some more before you experience food as a variegated, manipulative series of differences. As you get older, you will judge culinary success through a dish’s singularity as well as its ability to be reproduced. You will evaluate food according to how well it works within, whilst deviating from, its genre. I say “genre” because a meal’s style invokes its eponymous culture. A kind of gastronomic Epcot Center, categories such as Italian or Soul not only mime categories of identity, they prepare diners for hackneyed but reassuringly consistent flavors, ingredients, and packaging. For example, one expectation of American “Chinese Food” is that at the end of your meal you will be given a fortune cookie. This is a shimmery, crunchy, mass-produced confection with a piece of paper inside that either predicts your future, gives you advice, or tells you something about yourself. (This tradition actually seems to have started in Japan, which should tell you something about American food named after other countries.) The last type of fortune cookie is what I’d like you to think about.

For some other things I have to write, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “constitutive outside.” A theorist named Judith Butler uses this phrase to describe the repetitive and social ways in which recognition and belonging are individually and collectively endowed. Butler holds that seemingly static or transparent categories of identity are quite often the result of the enactment of a kind of statement named a “performative.” For example: “You are a boy.” I have repeated this statement to curious strangers since you’ve been born in response to the question of what you “are.” According to Butler, these kinds of performative speech acts have no force if they are only pronounced once, like a spell. A number of actions (performances) must follow (and precede) this pronouncement if its wisdom is to hold true. Conforming to and rejecting dominant understandings of what “boy” means will be a lifelong process. We, your parents, won’t be able to help our complicity with this process, but we are trying to be careful. We don’t believe that your gender is like the last kind of fortune cookie—static and didactic. The constitutive outside will swaddle you with layers of ways in which people understand what it does and will mean for you to be a boy. We hope your boyishness will, like a proper performative, reinstate itself in many different ways. We're here to help you with that process.

You are one month old.

You are asleep right now.

You are sometimes inconsolable. You are especially cranky in the afternoon.

You are not a fortune cookie.

Dear Jonas,

This week your Dad and I began the difficult process of trying to persuade you to sleep and eat with some degree of regularity. Ultimately, the point of this is to coerce you into sleeping through the night. Immediately, we want you to enjoy sleeping in your Moses basket as much as you enjoy sleeping on top of us. We feel guilty when we let you sleep in our bed because we know it’s not advisable. Now that we are parents, we fear the prospect of SIDS as we once, in our younger freewheeling days, feared other life and death acronyms.

The first night we tried to let you “cry it out” would probably be judged as unsuccessful by any outside observer. For me, your mother, it was just short of trauma. We have been reading this frustrating but reportedly quite effective book on how to convince your child to sleep through the night. I think it’s basically snake oil and that you are smart enough to learn this skill on your own, but we’re both new at this and we are also the sort of people who side with learned behavior over instinct. After spending my last ten years in graduate school fighting on the side of social construction, I could hardly make my own child the exception to nurture over nature. These phrases are reductive and I apologize. As soon as I think you are actually paying attention to the things I am reading you cribside we can start with Althusser and discuss how education is an ISA (Ideological State Apparatus). For now, just know that we are trying to inform ourselves of how to inform ourselves of your needs.

That said, I am not convinced yet of the need for us to let you scream through your disagreement with what we’d have you do. I mean, this book also says things that we don’t agree with. It has this weird homophobic introduction about the importance of a mother and a father for good parenting. Is it possible to take one part of the argument and leave the rest? Shouldn’t one part inform the other? Can it not?

Anyhow, last Wednesday I sat in the bathroom with both toilet paper and cotton balls in each ear, a glass of Rosé in my left hand and a copy of Marxism and Form on my lap. The more you screamed, the more I cried. My breasts also wept as my hormones accused me of frigid mothering. You were a fighter, of course. You screamed nonstop until we took you out and hugged you. Maybe you’re trying to tell us there is no “it” you need to cry out yet?